


Not Just at the End of Things

by QueenRiza



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire & Related Fandoms, A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin
Genre: Angst, Bedside Vigils, Canon Compliant, F/M, First Kiss, Hurt/Comfort, Jaime Lannister is bad at feelings, Jaime Lannister is kind of a bitch but ESPECIALLY to Hyle Hunt, Mutual Pining, Post-Stoneheart, The Quiet Isle
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-17
Updated: 2021-01-17
Packaged: 2021-03-14 21:16:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,291
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28801950
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/QueenRiza/pseuds/QueenRiza
Summary: It had been an impossible choice, so why can’t he forgive her for making it?
Relationships: Jaime Lannister/Brienne of Tarth
Comments: 27
Kudos: 173





	Not Just at the End of Things

**Author's Note:**

> Warnings for mentions of canon typical violence, implied canon typical incest, and one instance of canon typical ableist language. Thanks to ofwickedlight for helping out and reading this over for me!

Jaime had promised himself he would not speak harshly to Brienne, no more than was deserving, anyhow, but even in the few moments he can catch his breath, he still finds himself failing. _Of course_ , he thinks, _there’s a thin line beside ‘deserving.’ The wench_ betrayed _me._

There’s no joy from cruelty, though, no sweet revenge like he might have had from a bitter jab at Cersei. A thousand insults spring to mind for everyone he has ever loved, each of whom chose to turn their backs one by one, but with Brienne — well, Brienne is too far gone. 

He thought she had condemned them both to death in the wood. She had been an awful liar, painfully obvious in the way she avoided meeting his eyes in his tent, refused his offer to find some camp medic who could see to her wounds, and only mumbled her answers on the ride over. 

_“How far off is Clegane? In what state did you find the Stark girl?”_

_“Only a few miles from here. In distress, but good health.”_ And she wouldn’t say more than that.

But he had followed her. He’d followed her like a good little boy, like knights were meant to follow their kings into war, like he had followed Cersei to small empty rooms and Tyrion to his escape before he had murdered their father.

Now, Brienne is of no use for anything. Not to lead, not to fight, not to give answers. If the wounds to her face weren’t grisly enough, already festering with long untreated infection, then the ones taken in the ensuing fight more than make up for it. The hedge knight, Ser Kyle something, has managed to hoist her onto his horse, and Brienne, half-pressed against him as she slides in and out of consciousness, has managed to stain the knight and his steed red. 

“Podrick,” she says. “We haven’t—” 

“The boy’s dead,” Jaime snaps. Kyle shoots him an irritated glance. Jaime glares back. He could have fit Brienne on his horse, could have carried her back with him; he’s thinner, so it would have been a better fit than her and the hedge knight, but he supposes Ser Kyle thought him uncaring or too much of a cripple to manage both the horse and the woman. 

Podrick’s death is a fresh horror, though. An incredibly small loss of life in the face of impossible odds, but the boy had been far too young. Lady Catelyn, as demanding as Jaime feels she had been in life, was too honorable and perhaps even too moral to have let such a thing occur. 

But that was not Catelyn. Brienne is in distress, half dead and half alive, and Jaime almost wants to reach out in a kind of comfort. _That thing was not Catelyn Stark._

It doesn’t escape him that this was the boy that had squired for Tyrion either. Cersei had mentioned him in a list of those she felt may have been responsible for Tyrion’s escape, which Jaime had promptly chosen to ignore. Though Tyrion and Brienne couldn’t be two more different people to serve, it makes a queer kind of sense to him. _I cared for both_ , he remembers. _And both betrayed me. I’ll not make that mistake again._

* * *

Ser Kyle had taken them to the shores of the Trident and led them in a crooked path across dark mud. “The Quiet Isle,” he had said. “We took rest there on our way to the Saltpans. They’ll be able to help.” 

The brothers had not asked too many questions at the sight of them, just seemed tired. “Who was it?” the Elder Brother had asked. 

“Bandits,” Kyle had had the sense to say. “We were able to finish them off, but at a cost.” He did not mention Podrick, and the Elder Brother had not asked. 

Jaime had given them a false name, and if they suspected who he was, they didn’t mention it. There’s nothing in particular to identify him, he supposes. News of his disappearance should not yet be so widespread after only a few days, and his golden hand had been left with his horse and saddlebags at the Brotherhood’s camp. There were plenty of soldiers and knights alike who had lost limbs in the war. 

One of the brothers shows him to the baths. Jaime remembers one of the last times he had been with Brienne, in the baths of Harrenhal, her blue eyes fixated at the waters, then up to meet his with a gentleness he hadn’t known to expect. She had held him that night when his legs failed him. She had taken his longest kept secrets like a burden worth bearing.

And now she had lied to him, strung him along with a promise of duty and honor, and she had taken him to die. 

_And raised her sword to save you. And lost the boy because of it._

Jaime clothes himself and sets off to find the wench. The septons had tended to her the best they knew how, and with some prying, the Elder Brother assures him they’ve safely placed her in the women’s cottages on the east side of the isle. 

But on his way, only just outside the cottages’ perimeter, he finds Ser Kyle instead, as filthy and bloody as he’d been when they arrived. 

“Ser Kyle,” he greets. “They have baths here, you know. Fresh clothes, too, though I’d say the crimson suits you well enough.” 

“Hyle,” the man corrects. “Hyle Hunt.” 

A thousand japes spring to mind, a few funnier than the rest. “Hyle,” he repeats instead. He supposes he at least owes this man his real name, when he almost died for vows Jaime made. “So much has happened far too fast. I’m Ser Jaime,” he adds stupidly.

Hyle laughs, a short and biting thing. “I know who you are, Kingslayer.” 

It’s not even the word itself, but something about it — a bitterness, a half-joke — that makes Jaime bristle. “A pleasure, then, I’m sure.” 

Hyle shakes his head. “I meant no offense. It’s just that you’re the reason for all this, aren’t you? Stoneheart wanted you.” 

Jaime shrugs. “Rather unfairly.” _I had been trying to make good on my oath to her._

Hyle is quiet for a moment. Jaime can’t figure out whether or not this man hates him. “There’s nothing about this that’s fair.” 

“No,” says Jaime. “There’s not. There was never a reason for you to be involved. You or the boy.”

Hyle looks Jaime squarely in the eyes, brown firmly meeting green, before he speaks. “I’d met Brienne again by chance, you know,” he says, almost conversational. “We’d known each other before, back at Renly’s camp during the war.”

“You served Renly?” 

Hyle waves his hand. “The Tarlys, really. It’s no matter. All I mean is, I hadn’t really known her at the time. I think I thought that no woman who had made it into a place of war could last long, or if she did, there was something wrong with her. Of course, I hadn’t seen war then; none of us are made to last in it. But now, I think she’s a good enough woman. Might still be something wrong with her, but not in any kind of terrible way.”

“Yes, well. She has that way of sneaking up on you.” 

“She never mentioned you, though.”

Jaime ignores the pang in his chest, instead annoyed by Brienne’s dismissal. The wench would pull out Tommen’s letter if she had to, she would use her beautiful sword when she must, but still she would deny him. Wisely, perhaps. Just look at what an association with him has done to her already. 

“I knew she was looking for the Stark girl, but I had no idea just the kind of people she had been mixed up with... until suddenly, we were all expected to answer for you.” 

Jaime feels tired. Far too tired to indulge Hyle’s bitterness or his curiosity.

“It’s a complicated history. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I do mean to find her.” 

As he turns to go, Hyle hesitates for a moment, and Jaime can’t think what he means to say. “I don’t think you should.” 

He pauses. The brothers may be strict, but not enough that he shouldn’t be able to find his way around them. But Hyle is suddenly tense, one foot stepped forward as if he means to block Jaime’s path if he must. “Oh?” he says coldly.

“I know you can’t be pleased by what she did. Were I in your place, I would want revenge —” 

Jaime could almost laugh. Of course. _Of course._ “Yes,” he says, “Because I traveled all this way just to kill her, rather than just slaying you and leaving her to die.” 

“Me? Not much of a chance. I may not have won any melees, but I don’t suppose you’re as gifted with your left hand as they say you were with your right. Besides, I’ve been trying and thinking for a reason why you would have come with us all the way here instead of just heading back to your camp, and this is the only one I can find.” 

“Well, I wouldn’t put too much stock in your thoughts,” Jaime snaps.

“Fine then.” In the dark, Hyle crosses his arms stubbornly. “Then why are you still here?” 

But Jaime doesn’t have an answer, certainly not for Hyle, but not for himself either. It was the same impulse that brought him back to the bear pit, he supposes. Or perhaps not — if he had left Brienne with Hyle, he wouldn’t be leaving her to her doom as he would have at Harrenhal. And she had not betrayed him then. 

Jaime makes himself smile. “And if I do mean to kill her? You’ll stop me here? What will the brothers think of you spilling blood in their sanctuary? What would the crown think of you killing a Lannister?” 

“I’m not that stupid,” Hyle says. “No one even knows where you are, do they?” 

Jaime pushes past him. “Stop me then.”

Hyle hesitates. For a moment, Jaime really thinks this man will fight him, that he really will draw his sword on holy ground on Brienne’s behalf. “The brothers won’t let you in, anyway,” he says finally. “They separate the women and the men unless they’re married.” 

“Then I’ll tell them I’m worried for the health of my lady wife,” Jaime says. “After a life of broken oaths, what more does marriage add?” 

* * *

Brienne is asleep when Jaime finds her. The first brother he came across hadn’t believed him when he said he was her husband, but he had waited a bit for their duties to change and the second had accepted it well enough. _I don’t mean to spend the night anyhow. Just make sure the wench hasn’t died in her sleep._

Her wounds are awful. Jaime had known this; she was already nearly at the point of death when they had set off together, and the wounds she had taken from the Brotherhood are somehow even worse. But he’s a knight, used to gore on a battlefield and less used to healing. It feels different now, each of her wounds clean and neatly bandaged and yet still so, so terrible. 

He drops to his knees beside her bed, listening to her labored breaths. His betrayer, his savior.

He knows she couldn’t have taken any pleasure in it. She was far too bad a liar to get a thrill from deception, and she only could have done what she did for the sake of Podrick and Hyle, not for glory or wealth or anything besides, or she wouldn’t have done what she did, not drawn her sword to slay him and turned it back on Stoneheart. As much as he wants answers from her, he also knows them well enough. 

So why can’t he forgive her for managing an impossible choice? Why can’t he forgive her for being a truer knight than him, listening to her lady, making hard choices to protect the innocent? 

He ought to leave, but he stays there with her, slumped against the side of her bed. Sometimes her breathing hitches and he rises suddenly to his feet with misplaced urgency, as though if he’s quick enough, he can grab hold of her soul to keep her with him. Most of the time, though, he just waits. Not quite asleep, not quite awake. 

It’s not until morning that she finally wakes. 

“Jaime,” she says, too surprised and too sleepy to hide behind any formalities. She tries to raise herself from the bed, but bends over in pain halfway through, instead settling on sitting up. “You haven’t been here this whole time, surely?” 

Jaime shakes his head. “Only an hour,” he lies. “I only wanted to make sure that you hadn’t been done in completely.”

“But the brothers—”

Jaime shakes his head. “It doesn’t matter.” He had thought that if he’d only have the chance to speak with Brienne, he would know what to make of her. Instead, she is just as he knew she would be, eyes heavy with weight sleep can’t take away.

“So you never found the Stark girl after all,” he finds himself saying. 

She shakes her head. “I know you must hate me.”

No. _Yes._ “I don’t think I’d thought you were capable of lying on that scale. Though you were very bad at it. Perhaps I’m impressed.” 

“Perhaps?”

“I haven’t really made up my own mind how to feel.” He doesn’t need to, though. It’s kindness enough to let her go if he can’t forgive her. “I suppose I’m no good at making the best of difficult decisions either. I did try to kill that Stark boy, remember?”

Brienne blinks, her mouth twitching into something almost worse than a frown. After all this time, everything she knew and everything she’s seen, that still crosses a line.

“All I mean,” he says flippantly, “is that I understand the situation.” 

“I swore an _oath_ to you,” says the wench. _Does she not understand that I’m trying to release her?_

“And to Lady Catelyn first.” Jaime snaps. “Besides,” he smiles bitterly, “what have vows ever meant to me?” 

“Don’t think you can play that part in front of me still. I know better.” 

He meets her eyes for a long moment. Perhaps she does know him, as he thought he knew her. Things are too ugly between them now; she had accepted his darkness, once she’d understood it, yet still he refuses to take hers, insists on giving her absolution without his trust. 

“At Riverrun,” he says. “I managed to end the siege without bloodshed. I kept my oath to Catelyn that I would not spill Tully blood. But it was not nobly done. I told Edmure that I would raze his House like my father did the Reynes if he didn’t surrender, and I threatened his unborn son. And I would have,” he says. “I would have done it if I had needed to.”

Brienne’s face is impassive. “Why are you telling me this?” 

“I am trying to say —”

“That you understand my situation? That you know why I did what I did? I didn’t ask for that. Do you think me _dying_ , that you need to console me before I go?” Her features harden. “You’re trying to do me a kindness by letting me go, but I know, I _know_ , Jaime. There was no right choice, but still, I chose wrongly. I betrayed Lady Catelyn and you, and I killed Podrick besides.”

“You didn’t kill —”

“I might as well have. I saw a choice I didn’t want to make, and thought I could choose a third. I was wrong.” 

The answer, of course, is obvious, though he knows she will not say it. Not to him. She should have killed him. She should have turned her back on him and let him die. 

“Maybe we were made to be enemies,” Jaime muses. “The gods keep conspiring against us as allies, even when we have the best of intentions.” 

Brienne stares mournfully at the ground, bloody and awful. “I don’t wish to be your enemy,” she whispers. 

“And yet we’re the most natural enemies in the world.” Brienne doesn’t bother to disguise her hurt. He can’t hate her. “I can’t blame you for trying to find a third way out,” he says suddenly. “Though I wouldn’t have chosen as you did. My life against a hedge knight’s and a squire’s — I would have chosen mine. “Not because I think so highly of my own life, but if I had been able to return to live, to return to King’s Landing and Tommen, I might have been able to do something for the kingdom. It’s the ugliest choice,” he says. “And not one to sing of. But it’s the one I would have made.”

Brienne balks at him. “I don’t believe that,” she says. “I don’t believe that when it came to it, when innocents had to die—”

“Then you believe too much of me. I was going to kill Bran Stark, remember? Yes, you remember, you can’t forget. I didn’t push him out of cruelty, though, I pushed him to save Cersei, and to save our children. That had seemed like the right choice to me. It was awful, I _knew_ — I know it was awful, but I didn’t regret it either. 

“It is only occurring to me now that I ought to have spared the boy. I meant to save Cersei? She’s already lost to me. I meant to save our children and now the ones that are still living are being torn apart from war. I thought the worst thing I could do would have the least cost to myself and here I am anyway.” 

“Maybe there’s some justice from the gods after all.” 

“Do you think so? I don’t. I don’t even know if I believe in the gods. I do believe that you would have thought of something better, though. Even if things had gone badly, you would have borne the consequences well.”

Brienne is quiet. Her blue eyes seem darker somehow, weighed down with dim light. She’s not fully clothed; she wears a lightweight white gown, but the rest of her is so covered in bandages to not reveal much besides the occasional peek of a freckled shoulder or the curve of a relaxed muscle. She shifts, pulling her body into itself as if she can remove it from Jaime’s gaze. “What are you saying?”

Jaime leans forward. He doesn’t mean to, not really, but he can’t let her look away from him. Not him. Not now. Brienne stays by him. She does not pull away. 

“I’m saying, wench, that I trust you. For what good it would have done us. And even if you had told me what you meant to do.” He pauses. “I think I would have followed you anyway.” That was the bitterness then. That was the betrayal. He knew the trap he was being led into, and he would walk into it willingly again and again. 

Brienne is still, but Jaime can read everything he needs to in her eyes. This is the worst thing he could have told her. This is the cruelest thing he could have said. 

* * *

Jaime can leave if he likes. His wounds are minimal, beyond the irreparable, and the brothers have helped him tend them as best he can. A bandage wrapped around his arm, his head wound cleaned, and he ought to be on his way. After all, he has no intention of lingering with this depressing company. Hyle is welcome to Brienne if she’ll take him, and if either can stand to sit with each other knowing what they’ve lost. 

Jaime ought to go back to King’s Landing. They’ll have noticed his absence, and perhaps had enough time to declare him dead. Still, he stays the next day and the next and says to himself that he will leave in the morning. He corners Hyle Hunt and makes a show of having committed no murders. He asks the silent brothers what sort of men they’ve seen passing through these parts and when they refuse to speak, gives them a false history of his own. He doesn’t speak to Brienne, though. Not yet. 

She finds him in the end at the steps by the septry, watching the cattle and sheep grazing beside each other. She looks sweaty and tired, blood still threatening to seep through her bandages. Still, she manages to stand upright and walk about assistance. 

“Not a bad recovery so far, then,” Jaime observes. 

She nods, sitting down at the steps beside him. “The Elder Brother says I might be well enough to leave in a fortnight’s time, though I aim to make it a week.” 

“And then?”

She looks at her hands, big, freckled, and calloused, yet strangely gentle as she closes them into determined fists. “I still mean to find Sansa Stark. I don’t know where she is yet, but if she’s out there —” 

Brienne can’t truly consider herself bound to Catelyn anymore. Jaime knows well the lengths knights are expected to go for the lords and ladies they swear oaths to, but not even the strictest adherent would blame her for ending her service to a dead woman who tried to have her hanged. He almost tells her this — reminds her that at this point, the burden of delivering the Stark girls to safety ought to belong to him alone, but of course he should know better. That’s not why this matters to Brienne. 

Brienne fiddles with the end of her dress. She’s more fully clothed than that night in the cottage, but the shapeless white dress the brothers provided her with is simple enough that it still reminds Jaime of undergarments. “I should have told you,” she says softly. “I should have known I could trust you.” 

He doesn’t answer. “Will the knight go with you?” He hadn’t expected to ask this, but the question had been there, burning at the back of his mind in the place of heavier things — the way he had worried for Brienne, spoken of her almost tenderly, but still backed away when Jaime pressed him. 

“Hyle?” Brienne blinks. “If he still wants to, I wouldn’t turn him away.”

He can’t read her; Brienne, who has never been able to conceal a blush or a frown, has made her face completely blank. She looks at him oddly after a moment, though, reading something from him he hasn’t been able to find in her. “Hyle is not —” she begins. “ _I_ am not —”

“Oh,” says Jaime. “A loss for us all, I’m sure.” 

“And you? Will you go home?” Brienne is just a bit redder than before, just a bit less unreadable. “To your sister?” 

“Not to my sister,” he says darkly. “But to my son and my daughter, yes.” It’s the first time he’s called them this out loud to anyone who wasn’t Cersei or to Catelyn in that cursed cell, but Brienne was there, she knows. Of course she knows. “I owe them that I think, and the realm deserves to have Cersei’s influence on Tommen interceded.” 

In another world, he says, _Come with me._

In another world, she says, _Come with me._

In this one, neither speaks. Jaime thinks back to when he gave her Oathkeeper and how she could not understand him, how she assumed he would ask the worst of her. She understands now.

“You told me the truth,” she says. “When you said you have followed me even if I had told you about Stoneheart.” 

“Do you take me for a liar?”

“Maybe,” she says smiling — _teasing?_ “But not about this.” She shakes her head. “I couldn’t ask you to trust me now.” 

He does trust her though. Against everything, he still does. “You know that’s not why I can’t go with you.” 

“No,” she says quietly, and despite the weight in her eyes, Jaime is reminded of how young she still is. 

He reaches up with his good hand, for a moment just to adjust the bandages on her cheek. This is one of the worst of her wounds; one of the brothers did his best to stitch that gaping hole in her cheek, albeit sloppily. Brienne had dodged his initial questions about them, and he hasn’t pressed her; he can imagine well enough.

She shivers when his hand is close, but she doesn’t flinch, she doesn’t pull away. Her blue eyes meet his with a steadiness he hasn’t seen in nearly a year, when she took his sword and his impossible quest with nothing but belief.

It is so quiet here. A delicate wind ripples through the grass, and in the distance the animals murmur gently, but mostly, Jame hears a sudden quickening in Brienne’s breath. 

He kisses her. Because he would like to and because he had lied to the brothers about marriage anyway and because something, something in him knows that this is what he had been waiting for all along. That when Brienne had come to him bathed in blood, he would have followed her for honor, for duty, and for this too.

Her hands find their way to grip the collar of his shirt. She kisses him back, sweet and fierce and with an understanding that had burned beneath the two of them for far too long. He thinks for a moment that she could still bring him with her, that with a word from her he’d follow her again, but he also thinks she knows too well to ask.


End file.
